Alice Spring, or ‘Mparntwe’ in the local indigenous language, is a small town in the middle of the ‘Red Centre’, the Australian desert. A lively town, surrounded by beautiful nature, where the sun shines every day, where people sing, dance and celebrate and where for several months I had the time of my life. It is, however, also a town with two faces. The confrontation with the precarious situation of indigenous people today could not be avoided. Australia, a paradise for many and a hell for others.
A Tourist in Alice Springs
Before arriving in Alice Springs, different people had already warned me about walking on the streets at night and that there was a lot of crime. Upon my arrival I asked around about the situation and the stories got more detailed and described physical violence, rape, break-ins, robberies and so on. My own visual impressions confirmed the feeling of fear: they always harassed you for cigarettes or alcohol, they walked around drunk all the time whilst shouting at each other. An older lady threatened my boss with a knife and break-ins for alcohol in local businesses happened on a regular basis. At the hostel I stayed at young Aboriginal kids threw rocks at us and often a car window was smashed. These kids roam the streets in gangs with a ‘don’t care’ attitude, wearing swaggy street clothes and listening to American rap music. One kid, he must not have been older than 13, walked by and caressed my thigh. Another young boy from around the same age asked me for a cigarette, which I obviously refused, whereby he threw a ball at my head. Many a times they shouted “Fuck you motherfucker”. A friend of mine got robbed by a young Aboriginal girl and another friend was stopped and harassed while driving as the kids demanded his cigarettes.
Although the perception of insecurity can trump reality, the crime statistics of Alice Springs do not leave a lot to the imagination. When compared to other cities, Alice is one of the most dangerous in Australia. The biggest issues regard murder and domestic violence within Aboriginal communities themselves, but also sexual assault and harrasment, break-ins and violence against persons. In 2013 the Northern Territory, the state of Alice Springs, made headlines in The Guardian as “the murder capital of Australia”.
The criminality did not overshadow day-to-day life and I want to emphasize that Alice Springs is a lovely city to visit or live in (at least when you’re not Aboriginal...), however, there are visible issues that need to be addressed. My biggest concern therefore was not security, but incomprehension of the current situation. When you walk around the streets of Alice Springs you really feel the sorrow and anger of Aboriginals as well as the huge inequality between white and black. When you observe the behavior of the youngsters, you very clearly feel their underlying struggles and pain.
A tourist that doesn’t look beyond what he is shown will have a hard time getting a positive image of Aboriginals. Some of my colleague-backpackers told me they didn’t enjoy the Aboriginal culture because they “were very unfriendly” and didn’t live according to their traditional lifestyles anymore. “Aside from selling their paintings, all they do is smoke, drink, fight and eat KFC”. Indeed, it can’t get any more western. Not looking beyond, however, is not in my DNA, so I started reading, listening and talking.
Historical traumas and current policies
I dug into the subject and learned about the horrors of the colonial period, the killings of Aboriginals and the ‘Stolen Generation’. It then becomes clear how their culture and possibilities to ceremonially or ritually live their traditions got taken away from them. You also start to understand the historic traumas the people carry with them. Under the ‘Aboriginal Protection Act’ (or the assimilation project as you might better call it), an estimated 10.000 children were taken away from their parents. During this time Aboriginals could not speak their own languages and if an Aboriginal word was heard, this would have been enough of a reason to take away your child. Many then grew up in catholic mission school, where they tried to make them as white as possible. The kids that grew up in this environment gradually got out of touch with their own culture.
Margaret Heffernan, an Aboriginal woman that grew up in and around Alice Springs describes the consequences as follows: "Lots of the kids stopped respecting the old cultural values. They didn't listen to our senior leadership...some tried to fit into the white fellow roles that the supervisors expected of them. They thought they were going to get ahead in the beautiful new world being promised. But the education, jobs and money never really happened. The best positions still went to the white kids. So a lot of them got angry and just floated around as a wild bunch, forming their own gangs. And they lost respect for everything”. Once finished with school, no prospects for the future were offered and now they found themselves with one foot in the Aboriginal world and the other in the white, western world.
Still today systematic discrimination on the job market, discrimination, racism and a general lack of prospects are present. Even worse, a disproportionate and worrisome number of Aboriginal children is being placed in out-of home care. Some refer to this as the new stolen generation as the number of indigenous children being taken away from their families has almost doubled in the last decade. Everyone agrees that children should be removed from destructive domestic situations, however, Aboriginals feel the system is discriminating in comparison to white children and that taking away these children from their (extended) families and cultural community has disastrous effects on them. Furthermore, there is a link between children and youngsters placed in out-of-home care and those that end up coming into contact with the justice system. The number of young Aboriginal people in youth detention is more than problematic: although only 5% of the australian population of the age of 10-17 is indigenous, half of all incarcerated on this age are Aboriginal. In the youth detention centre of the Northern Territory, 94% is Aboriginal. They often get sent miles away and sometimes even without notifying the parents.
Moreover, the unjustified police violence towards Aboriginals in and outside of detention centres is being denounced. On the 9th of November, two weeks after I had left Alice Springs, my facebook account filled up with messages on the 19 year old Aboriginal man that was shot by the police in his house in Yuendumu, one of the many remote communities surrounding Alice Springs. The incident led to different protests around Australia, asking for answers and justice. People feel abandoned by the government and don’t trust the police anymore.
Growing up Aboriginal
Countless children are stuck in a hopeless cycle, which is difficult to understand or accept in a country that’s so (economically) developed as Australia. Consequently, there is a strong increase in the number of suicides for young Aboriginals. The causes are multiple: living in a situation of poverty, poor health circumstances, domestic violence and alcoholic parents (a lot of children are also born with fetal alcohol syndrome, leading to brain damage, hearing and behavioral issues). In addition, they grow up in an environment of prejudice, discrimination and racism. They struggle with their identity, and puberty at the same time. As such, a lot of children don’t attend school, get violent themselves or turn to petty crime.
I remember a night in one of the local bars when a young aboriginal girl approached me in the bathroom and said: “your hair is so beautiful. I wish my hair was straight and blonde. I want to be blonde, like you. I don’t like my black and curly hair”. She looked at herself in the mirror with disgust. It made me realize how difficult it must be to live in between these two worlds, how they struggle with their identity and how difficult it must be for them to make contact with ‘us’ seeing the prejudices that exist, even though they want to. I’m thinking of the Aboriginal woman that told me her life story and started to cry because she was separated from her family, or the Aboriginal man and woman who asked me questions about my country and wanted to teach me some words in their language.
A positive note
Luckily, there are also positive trends. There were lots of people and organizations in Alice Springs that dedicated themselves to building bridges and friendships, to keep the kids off the streets or that would fight for Aboriginal rights. The coming together of the whole community in relation to the shot 19 year old is a good example of this. The protest was successful because it is the first time in Australian history that a policeman was charged with murder in such circumstances.
Despite everything, this little desert town is a small and open-minded community, where people support each other and look out for one another. It’s a mixture of the regular Australian family, (neo)hippies, musicians, LGTB-community, travellers, Aboriginals and everything else. One of the most memorable nights was at the Bush Bands Bash, a festival that gave the stage to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders music. Coloured and white came together and danced the night away…
Alice springs is the base of the many tours to Uluru, the world-famous red rock and sacred Aboriginal site. The recent prohibition on climbing the rock is an important and hopeful event. It embodies a spiritual and psychological victory for a more than a decade long battle the local tribe has fought.
What now?
First of all, it’s important for tourists and backpackers to educate themselves en go into conversations with local people. It helps you to frame what you see and prevents the spreading of prejudice and misinformation on Aboriginal culture. A lot of my friends left with a distorted image, and that’s a shame.
It is clear that the policies of the Northern Territory only combat symptoms, which seem to have counterproductive effects. Without intense psychological and pedagogical support along with the termination of systemic and societal discrimination, the situation will not improve any time soon. It will also certainly not improve as long as Aboriginals don’t possess over the right of self-determination and as long as community-driven development is not supported by the government. The older Aboriginal generations regret the dissapearce of their culture, the widespread alcoholism and the situation of their children and grandchildren. The fight continues:
“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are alienated from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future (...) We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish”. (Uluru statement from the heart, 26 May 2017)